Beyond Tolerance: Moving Ahead Together
A Community-wide Conference Organized by the Santa Barbara School Districts
June 28, 1997
Kerrie Kvashay-Boyle, Santa Barbara High School SOAP Student
I suppose I better just be upfront about this. I am a privileged white girl and you might now be wondering just how exactly I can enlighten you and what exactly I have to say about problems of intolerance as they relate to youth. Hello, my name is Kerrie Kvashay-Boyle and I have been a part of the social, intellectual and political microcosm that is Santa Barbara High School for the past four years and I have a lot to say about problems of intolerance as they relate to youth.
I think that it is often very difficult for adults who don’t work with teenagers and sometimes even for those who do to understand what it is like to be a student. For instance, you guys all know how innately and blatantly sexist our school curriculum is. You guys all know that if it’s absolutely homophobic, encompassing our society’s fear and hatred of gay, lesbian and bisexual people, then it is definitely heterosexism perpetuating the idea that a deviant lifestyle exists but that it is not the "correct" or "natural" – if you will – choice. You already know this. But what you may not understand is that we know it too. I mean, I’ve noticed and I want you to know that the rest of us teenagers also have. I think that high school is a very ipolistic time for a lot of us and it is difficult for us teenagers to just say, "okay, we notice this" at one point or another but obviously no one cares because nothing is being done about it. I am representing SOAP right now. I am representing what is being done about it. SOAP is Students Organized Against Prejudice. It is a forum for discussion and, for most of us students, it is the only safe environment where issues such as homophobia, G.A.T.E. classes, interracial relationships, misinformation about immigration or sexism can be discussed.
If you want to know what it is like to be a student I want you to imagine the frustration of going from class to class and topic to topic every 45 minutes where many very sensitive issues are inadvertently brought up and then dropped. Imagine feeling like nobody else understands, nobody else cares enough to speak up and even if you chose to, no one would listen to you anyway. Well, I think that in reality everyone feels like this. We each have our own issues that we feel very strongly about and what we really want is to have somebody to listen.
I think that at my school we are idealistic. We really would like to all be friends but there just isn’t a safe place to do that. SOAP has created the environment needed to discuss issues in a refreshingly intelligent and sensitive way.
High school students feel very isolated. In my classes I look around and sometimes I think, "My god, you are all a bunch of idiots." I can’t even tell you how nice it is to come to SOAP at lunch and be surrounded by kids from all over campus who are not even remotely idiots. We don’t always hold the same point of view but we all respect one another and we all listen to one another. It gives me so much more faith in my fellow students.
I can stand here and I can say that intellectually I understand that right now there is no appropriate place in our current school structure to discuss issues such as, say, immigration. But that does not change the adverse affects that not dealing with these issues creates. My peers and I are angry about this and problems are created by it.
If any of you have teenagers I’m sure you’ve noticed that my generation tends to be a very cynical one and when I first saw the signs for SOAP around campus I know that I was cynical also. I read the little flyer that said "help fight prejudice" and I was like, "Whatever." Everyone knows there’s prejudice. Everyone knows that it’s bad. And what’s a little discussion group going to do about it? But it is really important to feel like part of a solution, not meant to feel like an anonymous wheel which is unknowingly part of this huge grinding machine of racism and sexism and every other awful "ism" that one can imagine.
And I want you to know that SOAP really has affected our campus. We started with 8-10 members and now we have 40-50 students who come every single week, not to mention the many stragglers who show up sporadically. In just our first really active semester of SOAP we’ve already invited San Marcos to start a SOAP of their own and we’ve invited their members to a day-long conference at UCSB where we had speakers and we discussed issues involving their school and ours. We’ve organized a panel discussion on homophobia where prominent members of the gay and lesbian community, along with former high school students who had experienced homophobia in high school on a personal level, to discuss issues with SOAP members and I think this is one of the most important meetings because homophobia is currently our most socially accepted intolerance. We invited people with viewpoints which we felt were not well represented at SOAP to a discussion on white supremacy at our school and in Santa Barbara. SOAP has given a brief presentation to the Human Relations Commission.
We’ve had a lot of half-day meetings because the issues we tackle aren’t always done in 45 minutes. Sometimes we need to take a while to process things and our Principal, Mr. Richards, has been very supportive with our longer meetings. He knows as well as we do that you can’t always just pack up, walk out, and move on to the next issue and the next class. We even have plans for an outreach program.
Yeah, I definitely think SOAP has affected our campus because like I mentioned before Santa Barbara High School is a microcosm which includes teachers and students who are often not sensitive enough. Many teachers and many students do not understand that some issues are sensitive or why they are. For instance, on a personal level, in one of my classes I read A Streetcar Named Desire and on my final quiz for the class there was a question that asked how Blanche DuBois had provoked her own rape. Now I understand that the teacher was asking me how Blanche increased the sexual tension in the household but the question seemed to me to be essentially stating that she was asking for it. Well at that point I couldn’t very well say that I was morally opposed to the test and I knew that now was not the time to discuss my feelings about the question. But the next day in class we did have a discussion and I didn’t feel like I was in a very safe environment to voice my opinions but I did anyway and I got very emotional and upset.
I went to the training to become an advocate for the Santa Barbara Rape Crisis Center and dispelling rape myths is very much one of my personal issues. I feel like SOAP has affected our campus because when I spoke up and I felt like I was the only one who was outraged at the insensitivity of the class and when I was feeling helpless and isolated and cynical, a classmate of mine who had disagreed on many issues with me during SOAP meetings, and who had heard me discuss rape at SOAP meetings turned and looked straight at me. "Kerrie," she said, "I really hear where you’re coming from." Since we have discussed these very issues at meetings, I knew that she did hear where I was coming from and that was enough to make me not feel isolated anymore.
I knew that I could take my experience to the SOAP meetings and discuss it with people who would agree with me and disagree with me but who would listen with respect. Everyone in SOAP knows people who aren’t and we all interact with school and our families, so we’ve multiplied and our voice has grown exponentially. Don’t underestimate us. Students today are very savvy and sophisticated in a lot of ways. Teenagers can speak with passion about important issues and we have the most pertinent perspective on how problems of intolerance relate to us because we experience it everyday.